Robot 6

Osamu Tezuka is coming to your iPad

Can’t get enough of Astro Boy and Black Jack? Here’s some good news for fans of Osamu Tezuka, a.k.a. “the father of manga”: Tezuka Productions is putting out an iPad app containing 62 volumes of Tezuka’s work and 39 episodes of “Motion Manga.” The manga are translated (the motion manga are subtitled) and stored in the cloud, and you can access all of it for a subscription fee of $9.99 per month. It’s already in the iTunes store. The service will expand to Android tablets in the fall and winter, and a host of other foreign-language versions are under consideration.

I downloaded the app, which is free, onto my iPad. The selection isn’t bad: In addition to Black Jack and Astro Boy, it offers volumes of Ode to Kirihito, Apollo’s Song, Dororo, Phoenix, Buddha, MW, and Adolf. (One has to wonder how some of this content got through the iTunes store’s screening.) It’s not very responsive, though: I got the opening screen you see above, but the touch controls to download the magazines and configure the app didn’t respond until I held my finger down on them for a while. This happens sometimes with iPad apps—Comics+ used to be very slow and you had to almost hit the screen to make it work, before they upgraded it—but by now I’d like to see that kind of bug worked out. One more beef, as long as I’m complaining: It’s customary to offer some free samples to entice people to buy, but all you get with this app is an invitation to subscribe. I’d rather pay a few dollars more for one of Vertical’s beautifully produced volumes of Black Jack or Dororo and get to keep it forever, but if you want to gorge yourself at an all-you-can-eat Tezuka buffet, this does offer a lot of manga for a decent price.